


in motion

by snapspark



Series: distant thunder [1]
Category: Mystic Messenger (Video Game)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-27
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-08-18 04:31:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8149187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snapspark/pseuds/snapspark
Summary: She looks up, ready to argue, to drop him a hint or two, only to find him glancing down at her like he already knows. Like he’s reflecting her thoughts again with the same old Ryu Hyun magic.Zen / MC with a darker tone





	

**Author's Note:**

> For the sake of smooth reading I've named MC 'Kaeul', which means autumn and is in fact a real name.

Ryu Hyun knows of an obscure rooftop, one with an unbridled view of the universe from skyline to skyline, just a portal’s hop away from the half-submerged windows of his underground apartment. 

They’ve sat in the same spot in the early morning so often the ground is lighter where their hands grip when they hang rebelliously, every time, on the outside of the neglected railings, shower slippers clattering against the side of the building in the breeze. Nobody else crazy enough stays long enough to watch the moon fall, then scoots some ten meters down the wall for a front row seat to sunrise. 

Today she’s eating a small cup of yogurt with a tiny silver spoon, wrapped in a cardigan and a pajama gown down to her knees. 

A gust of chilly wind breathes through between her legs, and she shivers from the lingering chill, wet and still stretched, warm and swollen from not long ago. 

There had been talk of a collaboration, from the director, with one of those people from the past that Hyun can’t remember enough to properly forgive, one of those names jotted down in a mental diary now lost in a box in the attic of a house he’s moved out of. Some time earlier he had tried his hardest not to wake her when he left and returned from the gym at 3 AM, but she had spent the last hour running the treadmill in her mind.

Remembering it, the way he looked for the first time and the way he still looks at her now, gives her shivers.

“Hm?” Hyun glances over. Kaeul shakes her head. 

“Nothing.” So he tightens his arm around her.

There’s three quarters a cigarette burning in that hand, neglected since their kiss, like the wind is smoking it. He’d been trying to quit since 5 months ago, when they met and fell in love during the subsequent storm of parties and scandals and life and death battles, and she decides he’s kept enough of his other promises that it’s ok to let this one go. 

Hyun feels her fingers slide between his, but only momentarily. When she withdraws he realizes he’s left with less than he started.

The way she stares at the cigarette in her fingers with hair whisked around her face reminds him of how she looks when he’s guiding her down by the hair, so it takes him a real moment to register that her taking it between her lips is not a dream.

“Hey, wait…”

She doesn’t. Never did. A deep inhale welcomes the foreign warmth. Her first thought is ‘This tastes like car fuel, a great heated cloud of it, like standing by the bus exhaust in the winter desperate for some second-rate warmth while waiting to board”.

It escapes back out from a thin part in her lips.

‘What does it mean to love someone?’ Kaeul wonders, leaning back into Hyun, but the cigarette continues to burn in her fingers.

It seems surreal, the things she’d been able to say during those days when they first met, like an uplifted caricature of herself unaware of what it meant to lose and be lost. A younger, more positive version, which has slowly receded from every gesture within reality but her own biased memory. So many words of hope and bravery, the strength to support someone else that she’d never been able to gather for herself. Her feelings reflected on a mirror forced to self-observe this incredulous transformation, until the mirror’s silver glare dissipated into glass and one day she noticed Hyun has been standing on the other side with her gaze reflected back.

It felt hardly fair that she could pick up her phone during one of those many ordinary days, when there was little to possibly anticipate and pray for but acquiescence, to find her life changed by one text message from an unknown number. Somewhere far from where she thought she had no choice but to be, meeting people she had no reason to meet. She didn’t feel she deserved this.

Here she was a different person. Her sadness sleeps, for the first time in years, and Kaeul feels so thin without it, but so light at the same time. It’s real, all of this. Merely a version of Kaeul that’s been forgotten, waiting this whole time to spring forth again for the right person. Hyun was the brightest thing that’s come into her life, and she wanted to match him with all she had, scared one day the charade will fall and he will see the sewage of her spirit trickle out from the crack in the duct taped dam.

But whether she felt she deserved him, whether she doubted he would have still loved her under a different circumstance, it had happened this way and now she couldn’t let him go. 

“Honey…”

Kaeul looks up.

“You’re crying,” Hyun says, with a soft chuckle.

Kaeul wipes her unknown tears herself, scared that if Hyun caught a drop with his thumb he would be able to give her an answer, the way scientists know how to distinguish tears under the microscope. Kaeul convinces herself that maybe she didn’t have to be a beacon of light to have the power left in her heart to save just one person. Maybe that alone is her own effort. Whether she is the only one who could have done it, she is the one who did. Always capable, always been there, just waiting to meet someone who moved her enough for her to remember what it felt like to want to be happy.

Hyun takes the flickering stump out of her fingers. Stubs it on a dry leaf on the ground.

“Something this bad doesn't suit you.”

She looks up, ready to argue, to drop him a hint or two, only to find him glancing down at her like he already knows. Like he’s reflecting her thoughts again with the same old Ryu Hyun magic.

She stares at him for two seconds too long to catch a glimpse of his creased brows and something like a very familiar pain in the pit of his eye, before he’s smiling again, with blissful confidence.

“Doesn’t suit you either, you know.” Kaeul drops her head back onto his shoulder slowly, drifts back into the haze of dream.


End file.
